Agenda - 09-20-1994 - Laserfiche WebLink

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�q- 1 9I?0/g y Presentation to Orange County Commissioners by Peter Morcombe at the OWASA building on September 20, 1994 On September 15, a lengthy letter by Neil Pedersen appeared in the Chapel Hill Herald. He was protesting an earlier editorial about the "McDougle muddle". On some points I agree with Pedersen. Simply said, the contractor was at fault. I also agree with Pedersen that liquidated damages will be very hard to collect and I urge the CHCCS not to waste taxpayer money by pursuing legal remedies. We will soon forget the drama surrounding the school opening but we will remember that the contractor, R.L.Casey, did good quality work and constructed a fine building. The company tried to hire the workers needed to complete the job on time but failed owing to an upturn in the economy which shrank the labor pool. Let us not punish them for an honest effort, particularly as no major harm has been done. Pedersen mentioned changes in the district administration as a result of his promotion and the departure of Richard Drake. The replacement staff members were not experienced in construction. This was good for the McDougle project in many ways, because the new people (Preyar and Mullins) lacked the confidence to micro-manage it. Instead, the management was left to the architects and the project manager (Gunning) who did a pretty good job. However, the writer completely destroyed his credibility when he turned to the flooding of my property. He showed that he is not big enough to admit a fault or make an apology. I was ready to let bygones be bygones until he used the despicable strategy of blaming the victim. Unlike the Menendez parents, I am very much alive, so I can say what really happened. It started with a mistake by the project engineer who failed to take adequate steps in response to a warning from Warren Faircloth (Orange County Erosion Control Office), in May 1992: "For example, the residence at 110 Lisa Drive appears to be straddling the drain way below the storm drain outlet at the southeast corner of the site. It is difficult to be sure but it appears that runoff is carried through a small pipe around the house, which works for the undeveloped watershed. However, the increase in runoff from the school will probably overwhelm this house." In the grand scheme of things it was a small mistake that would have cost less than $15,000 to correct if the district administrators had simply asked the engineers to fix it. Instead they chose to take charge of the situation themselves. This was indeed a "McDougle muddle". As a result of poor management skills, poor judgment and a string of broken promises, the final cost was over $90,000. The district school administrators were entirely to blame for the additional $75,000 and yet they only had to pay a fraction of this amount. Pedersen says that this indicates where the responsibility lies. The truth is that the Board of Education is exempt from most civil penalties so I had no alternative but to go after the engineering company in order to recover my costs and damages. This is bad law and there is increasing awareness that public servants should be subject to the laws that apply to the rest of us. When the flooding started, I had no reason to distrust the school administrators. To save time and money, I agreed to the construction of a drain system with the intake on my property. Seven months after the flooding started they reneged on this arrangement, so I took legal action. At this point, I no longer had any sympathy for the Board of Education and - insisted that the drain system be redesigned with the intake on their property. While this increased the cost and time to completion, the final result was much better.